https://zapier.com/blog A blog about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work. Wed, 04 Nov 2026 21:23:28 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-survey-apps Without surveying your customers or clients, how do you know you're making the right business decisions? Even if you have tons of market knowledge and years of experience, data can add an extra angle to help keep you grounded. This is why companies, researchers, and feedback-driven people turn to survey apps to tap into the insights and opinions of their target audiences. But it's hard to choose the best-fitting survey app for you, especially considering the ocean of software at your disposal. T Kiera Abbamonte Wed, 04 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-survey-apps https://zapier.com/blog/best-wordpress-booking-plugin I've been going to the same barber for years. He has his own shop now, and everything is great, but booking at his old shop was a mess. I'd click "Book now" and get transported to a completely different site with a strange logo, which asked me to enter every shred of personal information I had. It felt like walking down a dark alley where every turn could be a virus, a credit card scam, or a guy in a trench coat selling counterfeit watches. That's why a lot of businesses invest in a WordPress bo Ben Lyso Wed, 04 Nov 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-wordpress-booking-plugin https://zapier.com/blog/claude-duet Claude Duet is Anthropic's answer to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots. It's an always-on AI agent, which means that instead of waiting for you to type a prompt, it sends you a morning brief, checks your connected apps to see where it can be helpful, and works on tasks in the background. Terrifying? A bit. But before it sends, pays, signs, or deletes anything, it asks you first. It's still in research preview, but I got early access and spent some time with it on my phone. Here's what Claude Duet is Wade Burrell Wed, 04 Nov 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/claude-duet https://zapier.com/blog/best-no-code-app-builder You're vibing with your AI coding agent, and your prototype is working well in the preview window. Brimming with excitement, you hit publish to share your creation with the world. Everything is great for one or two days, but then the problems start: your users report broken features and clunky app behavior.  So, you go back to Lovable or Cursor and ask to fix the bugs, adding a motivating "no mistakes!" to the end of the prompt. What should be the path to making everything right instead leads yo Miguel Rebelo Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-no-code-app-builder https://zapier.com/blog/google-drive-vs-google-photos Google has two apps you can use to upload and share photos: Google Drive and Google Photos. That might seem like one too many, especially since they pull from the same storage. But the goal of each app is different. For everyday photos and videos you take on your phone, Google Photos is fantastic at organizing and editing them, backing them up, and making it easy to find what you're looking for. For professional-quality photos, videos, and project files from apps like Lightroom or Photoshop, Goo Ryan Kane Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-drive-vs-google-photos https://zapier.com/blog/free-project-management-software Everyone has a different way of managing projects. Some people like to use their inbox to keep track of tasks. Others prefer to visualize work on a Kanban board or in a calendar view, while some even prefer the old pen and paper system. That's fine on an individual level, but when you collaborate on projects as a team, you need a flexible and capable project management tool that works for everyone. And with so many teams working remotely, there's an even more pressing need for a task management Kiera Abbamonte Fri, 30 Oct 2026 14:44:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/free-project-management-software https://zapier.com/blog/ai-transformation It can feel impossible to escape the pressure to "do something" with AI. Maybe your CEO just asked about your AI strategy in an all-hands, or your competitors are shipping faster thanks to automation. Or maybe you're just tired of watching your team lose hours every week to tasks a bot could easily handle. You know AI is a big deal—but figuring out where to start is where most teams get stuck. You don't need another one-off pilot project that fizzles out after a few weeks, or a massive consultin Nicole Replogle Fri, 30 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-transformation https://zapier.com/blog/automate-grok Grok has a very specific edge over other AI models: live access to X, so your agents can keep their finger on the pulse a little more easily. But outside of that, Grok models and agents are still solid alternatives to what OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have on offer. And if you're using Grok for work, you'll want to connect it to the rest of your tech stack. The most secure and easiest way to do that is with Zapier. There are two main ways to automate Grok with Zapier. You can add Grok to the wo Nicole Replogle Fri, 30 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-grok https://zapier.com/blog/meta-ai-muse-spark Meta has shifted to a new family of flagship AI models called Muse and sent the Llama "herd" of models to the farm upstate. It's a dramatic but understandable shift in AI strategy from the company that was once pioneering open models. The newest models are Muse Wonder and Muse Spark, and they're Meta's first real attempt at top-tier frontier models. Unlike the Llama models, both are closed-weight proprietary models. You won't be able to download them from Hugging Face or run them on your own mac Harry Guinness Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/meta-ai-muse-spark https://zapier.com/blog/grok-bot Working with AI is getting weird. Two years ago, I used to do most tasks by myself and then jump into a chatbot task to solve a problem four or five times per hour. These days, I end up staring at my screen while my agents do my research, tear down my drafts, or fix up formatting—mostly to make sure they're not going off-task. Is that what we're supposed to be, now? Glorified babysitters to thinking machines? Grok Bot is SpaceX Super Intelligence's solution to this problem. Instead of a chatbot Miguel Rebelo Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/grok-bot https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-agent-builder AI agents have matured fast, and I've been in the weeds the whole time. These days, AI agents are running a lot of my processes in the background. And it's not just me or the Zapier team: 84% of enterprises plan to boost AI agent investments. Agents can run complex, org-wide workflows across your entire app stack. I work at Zapier, and I think it's the best option to make that happen, but I also know that's not a universal truth—and I'd rather help you figure out which one actually fits than ju Nicole Replogle Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-agent-builder https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-project-management-tools When was the last time you looked at your project management app and didn't get a stress level spike? No matter how much you plan or reprioritize, it always feels like running a sprint on a tightrope. But now that AI is in the game, we can pass that stress over to the robots. With AI being added to almost every app in existence, we've seen a surge in AI project management tools. There's still no replacing the human project manager, but AI project management apps can help things move more smoothl Miguel Rebelo Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-project-management-tools https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier Staying up to date on the latest AI models is like trying to keep my house vacuumed in the height of my dog's shedding season (a losing battle). New AI models drop practically every week, and it's not exactly obvious which ones deserve a spot in your workflows. This guide is your cheat sheet, with every model you can automate on Zapier right now, sorted by provider. If you just want to cut to the chase and find out which model you should be using for which task, that's what AutomationBench is fo Nicole Replogle Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-presentation-maker The days of spending hours dragging images to just the right place on a slide are far behind us. You can now create a presentation with AI, giving the robots the job of setting the structure, adding the initial content, and executing on the aesthetics of your deck. All you have to do is tweak it with your information, human insights, and flair—and rehearse it a bit before the big performance. I spent a month testing all the best presentation software, focusing on the ones that use AI in a way t Miguel Rebelo Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-presentation-maker https://zapier.com/blog/automate-google-ai-studio Anyone who lives in the Google ecosystem has probably used Gemini for a quick draft or a fast answer. (Or if you're like me, you've been driven to your limit by the Google Docs popups encouraging you to use AI whenever your cursor strays too close to the bottom of the screen.) But a chat window is just the beginning of what Gemini can do. Its real power shows up when you connect it to the rest of your apps and let it do work on your behalf. Gemini's models are available in Zapier, so you can add Nicole Replogle Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-google-ai-studio https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini Google has been in its "Gemini era" for a couple years now, and while the confusing rebrandings have slowed, everything else continues to improve at a rapid pace. Gemini is the name Google gave to its current generation family of multimodal AI models, but in typical Google fashion, it also applies to basically everything else that's related to AI. It can get a touch confusing since, by my reckoning, Google has: Google Gemini, a family of multimodal AI models. The newest is Gemini 4, though some Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini https://zapier.com/blog/best-llm Large language models (LLMs) are what most people think of when they think of AI. They're what you're interacting with in ChatGPT and Claude, they write the code generated by Claude Code and Codex, and they power other AI features like Google's AI answers and Apple Intelligence. If something has a chatbot, some kind of text generator or text summarization built in, or writes code or automates your computer, it almost certainly uses an LLM. LLMs have been studied in research labs since the late 2 Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-llm https://zapier.com/blog/openai-playground ChatGPT can do basically anything you ask, but you really don't have a huge amount of control over its outputs. If you want to do more with OpenAI's models, you need to dig a little deeper.  If you really want to see what the models can do and exert some control over how they respond, you need to get your hands properly dirty and play around with the API. That way, you can really pull the levers that control what they can create. Here's how to go about doing it.  How to use the OpenAI playground Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/openai-playground https://zapier.com/blog/how-does-chatgpt-work I've been writing about AI since before most people knew what it stood for, so a question as simple as "What is ChatGPT?" should be a softball. But as OpenAI has kept pushing ChatGPT forward with new models and features, it's gotten surprisingly hard to answer. ChatGPT isn't just a chatbot anymore. It's an agent harness, a coding agent, an always-on personal assistant, and a bunch of other terms that have all gotten a bit fuzzy. Here, I'll do my best to break it all down for you. Table of conte Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/how-does-chatgpt-work https://zapier.com/blog/recover-deleted-files-google-drive I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little too click-happy on the internet. Most of the time, it results in silly errors like having to go to a distant cousin's bachelorette party because I accidentally reacted to the text invite with a thumbs-up instead of a resounding "I'll pass, thanks." Other times, it results in panic. Like when I accidentally delete an important file in Google Drive. If you're reading this article, I suspect it's because you're in a similar panic mode. If you recently de Jessica Lau Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/recover-deleted-files-google-drive https://zapier.com/blog/ai-cost-management Does $5,000 in AI spend equal $5,000 in value? If it does, that's a bad investment. A 1x return wouldn't get approved anywhere else in our budget, and AI doesn't get an exception. As the Chief Operating Officer at Zapier, the question I really care about is whether that investment returned more than it cost. But you can't calculate that without seeing the spend, so that's the part we fixed first. When we initially rolled out AI tools across the organization, everyone got open access, and we meas Ryan Roccon Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-cost-management https://zapier.com/blog/automationbench-on-specialized-intelligence-index Today, AutomationBench joins Fireworks' Specialized Intelligence Index (SII), bringing business workflow automation to a growing collection of practitioner-built benchmarks that compare AI models on real work. We're one of 32 new partners in this round, alongside teams covering fields like finance, healthcare, software, and ML research. AutomationBench measures whether an AI agent can finish a business workflow end to end across sales, marketing, operations, support, finance, and HR. Being part Tracy Lee Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automationbench-on-specialized-intelligence-index https://zapier.com/blog/slack-to-do-list I know the best approach to a calm, focused workday is to dive into my deepest work with as few distractions as possible. But we live on Slack at Zapier, so calm, focused, and distraction-free are hard to come by. Slack to-do lists give you a one-click way to corral chats into an organized to-do list without leaving the app. But beyond Slack's dedicated to-do list feature, here are a few other ways to create and manage a to-do list in Slack. Table of contents: How to use Slack to-dos How to use Jessica Lau Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/slack-to-do-list https://zapier.com/blog/best-notion-alternatives Notion is a special app. Starting from an empty screen, you add notes and documents in a freeform way. Then, when the original page is too crowded, you create your first database and the possibilities explode: you can create a custom productivity system and change it as you evolve. But productivity is evolving. Knowledge management platforms need to support human teams while making room for AI agents, with automation and guardrails in place to make sure you do more work, not spend more time revi Miguel Rebelo Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-notion-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/hubspot-certifications When I started out as a freelance writer, I didn't have a professional background in content marketing. I not only needed to learn everything I could about my new industry, but also had to show potential clients that I was worth investing in. And after creeping on a few freelancer subreddits, I learned HubSpot certifications were exactly what I needed. But the courses you can take from HubSpot Academy go well beyond my niche—in fact, they run the gamut from marketing to sales and even web develo Kiran Shahid Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/hubspot-certifications